Part 4

Sick at heart Old Mole lay in his bed staring, staring into the darkness, and the blood in him boiled and bubbled, and his skin was taut and he shivered. He had heard of men beating their wives, but as one hears of the habits of wild animals in African forests; he had thought of it as securely as here in England one may think of a man-eating tiger near an Indian village. Now, here, in the next room, the thing had happened. Manliness, that virtue which at school had been held up as the highest good, bade him arise and defend the woman. In theory manliness had always had things perfectly its own way. In practice, now, sound sense leaped ahead of virtue, counted the cost and accurately gauged the necessity of action. In the first place to defend Mrs. Copas would mean an intrusion into the sanctuary of human life, the conjugal chamber; in the second place, in spite of many familiar pictures of St. George of Cappadocia (subsequently of England), it would be embarrassing to defend Mrs. Copas in her night attire; in the third place, the assault had grown out of their altercation of which he had heard nothing whatever; and, lastly, it might be a habit with Mr. and Mrs. Copas to smite and be smitten. Therefore Old Mole remained in his bed, faintly regretting the failure of manliness, fighting down his emotion of disgust, and endeavoring to avoid having to face his position. In vain: shunning all further thought of the miserable couple in the next room, he was driven back upon himself, to his wretched wondering:

"What have I done?"

He had thrown up his very pleasant life in Thrigsby and Bigley, a life, after all, of some consequence, for what? . . . For the society of a disreputable strolling player who was blind with conceit, was apt to get drunk on Saturday nights, and in that condition violently to assault the wife of his bosom. And he had entered into this adventure with enthusiasm, had seen their life as romantic and adventurous, deliberately closing his eyes to the brutality and squalor of it. Thud, whack! and there were the raw facts staring him in the face.

There came a little moaning from the next room: never a sound from the bass: and soon all was still, save for the mice in the skirting board and occasional footsteps on the cobbles of the street outside.

No sleep came to Old Mole until the pale light of dawn crept into his room to show him, shivering, its meanness and poverty. It sickened him, but when in reaction he came to consider his old mode of living that seemed so paltry as to give a sort of savor to the coarseness of this. . . . Anyhow, he reflected, he was tied to his bed, could not take any action, and must wait upon circumstance, and hope only that there might not be too many violent shocks in store for him.

Mrs. Copas bore the marks of her husband's attentions: a long bruise over her right eye and down to the cheek-bone, and a cut on her upper lip which had swelled into an unsightly protuberance. Her spirit seemed to be entirely unaffected, and she beamed upon him from behind her temporary deformities. When she asked him if he had slept well, he lied and said he had slept like a top.

She brought him hot water, razor, brush and soap, and he shaved. Off came his beard, and, after long scrutiny of his appearance in the mirror and timid hesitation, he removed the moustache which had been his pride and anxiety during his second year at Oxford, since when it had been his constant and unobtrusive companion. The effect was startling. His upper lip was long and had, if the faces of great men be any guide, the promise of eloquence. There was a new expression in his face, of boldness, of firmness, of--as he phrased it himself--benevolent obstinacy. His changed countenance gave him so much pleasure that he spent the morning gazing into the mirror at different angles. With such a brow, such an upper lip, such lines about the nose and chin, it seemed absurd that he should have spent twenty-five years as an assistant master in a secondary school. Then he laughed at himself as he realized that he was behaving as he had not done since the ambitious days at Oxford when he had endeavored to decide on a career. Ruefully he remembered that in point of fact he had not decided. With a second in Greats he had taken the first appointment that turned up. His history had been the history of thousands. One thing only he had escaped--marriage, the ordinary timid, matter-of-fact, sugar-coated marriage upon means that might or might not prove sufficient. After that, visiting his friends' houses, he had sighed sentimentally, but, with all the eligible women of his acquaintance--and they were not a few--he had been unable to avoid a quizzical tone which forbade the encouragement of those undercurrents upon which, he had observed, middle-aged men were swept painlessly into matrimony. . . . Pondering his clean-shaven face in the mirror he felt oddly youthful and excited.

In the evening Matilda came as she had promised, with the book, which proved to be that Life of Napoleon by Walter Scott which so incensed Heine. The sun shone in at the window upon the girl's brown hair, and as she opened the book the church bells began to ring with such an insistent buzzing that it was impossible for her to read. As he lay in bed Old Mole thought of Heine lying in his mattress-grave, being visited by his _Mouche,_ just such another charming creature as this, young and ardent, and by her very presence soothing; only he was no poet, but a man dulled by years of unquestioning service. He gazed at Matilda as he could not recollect ever having gazed at a woman, critically, but with warm interest. There was a kind of bloom on her, the fragrance and graciousness that, when he had encountered it as a young man, had produced in him a delicious blurring of the senses, an almost intoxication wherein dreadfully he had lost sight of the individual in the possession of them, and considered her only as woman. Now his subjection to the spell only heightened his sense of Matilda's individuality and sharpened his curiosity about her. Also it stripped him of his preoccupation with himself and his own future, and he fell to considering hers and wondering what the world might hold for her. . . . Like most men he had his little stock of generalizations about women, how they were mysterious, capricious, cruel, unintelligent, uncivilized, match-making, tactless, untruthful, etc., but to Matilda he could not apply them. He wanted to know exactly how she personally felt, thought, saw, moved, lived, and he refused to make any assumption about her. This curiosity of his was not altogether intellectual: it was largely physical, and it grew. He was annoyed that he had not seen her come into the room to mark how she walked, and to procure this satisfaction he asked her to give him a glass of water. He watched her. She walked easily with, for a woman, a long stride and only a very slight swing of the hips, and a drag of the arms that pleased him mightily. As she gave him the glass of water she said:

"You do look nice. I knew you would, without that moustache."

She had a strong but pleasant North-Country accent, and in her voice there was a faint huskiness that he found very moving, though it was only later, when he analyzed the little thrills which darted about him in all his conversations with her, that he set it down to her voice. . . . She resumed her seat by the foot of his bed with her book in her hand, and his physical curiosity waxed only the greater from the satisfaction he had given it. He could find no excuse for more, and when the bells ceased he took refuge in talk.

"Where were you born, Matilda?"

"In a back street," she said. "Father was a fitter, and mother was a dressmaker, but she died, and father got the rheumatism, so as we all 'ad--had--to work. There was----"

"Were." She blushed and looked very cross.

"Were three girls and two boys. Jim has gone to Canada, and George is on the railway, and both my sisters are married, one in the country, and one in Yorkshire. I'm the youngest."

"Did you go to school?"

"Oh! yes. Jackson Street, but I left when I was fourteen to go into a shop. That was sitting still all day and stitching, or standing all day behind a counter with women coming in and getting narked----"

"Getting what?"

"Narked--cross-like."

"I see. So you didn't care about that?"

"No. There is something in me here"--she laid her hand on her bosom--"that goes hot and hard when I'm not treated fair, and then I don't care a brass farthing what 'appens."

She was too excited as she thought of her old wrongs to correct the last dropped aitch, though she realized it and bit her lip.

"I been in service three years now, and I've been in four places. I've had enough."

"And what now?"

"I shall stop 'ere as long as you do."

Something in her tone, a greater huskiness, perhaps, surprised him, and he looked up at her and met her eyes full. He was confused and amazed and startled, and his heart grew big within him, but he could not turn away. In her expression there was a mingling of fierce strength, defiance, and that helplessness which had originally overcome him and led to his undoing. He was frightened, but deliciously, so that he liked it.

"I didn't know," she said, "that uncle drank. Father drank, too. There was a lot in our street that did. I'm not frightened of many things, but I am of that."

He resented the topic on her lips and, by way of changing the subject, suggested that she should read. She turned to her book and read aloud the first five pages in a queer, strained, high-pitched voice that he knew for a product of the Board School, where every variance of the process called education is a kind of stiff drill. When she came to the end of a paragraph he took the book and read to her, and she listened raptly, for his diction was good. After he had come to the end of the first chapter she asked for the book again and produced a rather mincing but wonderfully accurate copy of his manner. She did not wait for his comment but banged the book shut, threw it on the bed, and said:

"That's better. I knew I could do it. I knew I was clever. . . . You'll stop 'ere for a bit when you're better. You mustn't mind uncle. I'll be awfully nice to you, I will. I'll be a servant to you and make you comfortable, and I won't ask for no wages. . . ."

"My dear child," replied Old Mole, "you can't possibly have enjoyed it more than I."

She was eager on that.

"Did you really, really like it?"

"I did really."

So began the education of Matilda. At first he drew up, for his own use, a sort of curriculum--arithmetic, algebra, geography, history, literature, grammar, orthography--and a time-table, two hours a day for six days in the week, but he very soon found that she absolutely refused to learn anything that did not interest her, and that he had to adapt his time to hers. Sometimes she would come to him for twenty minutes; sometimes she would devote the whole afternoon to him. When they had galloped through Oman's "History of England" she declined to continue that study, and after one lesson in geography she burned the primer he had sent her out to buy. When he asked her where Ipswich was she turned it over in her mind, decided that it had a foreign sound and plumped for Germany. She did not seem to mind in the least when he told her it was in England, in the Eastern Counties. . . . On the other hand, when he procured their itinerary for the next few months from Mr. Copas and marked it out on the map for her, she was keenly interested and he seized on the occasion to point out Ipswich and, having engaged her attention, all the county towns of England and Scotland.

"Where were you born?" she asked.

He found the village in Lincolnshire.

"And did you go to a boarding-school?"

He pointed to Haileybury and then to Oxford. From there he took her down the river to London, and told her how it was the capital of the greatest Empire the world had ever seen, and how the Mother of Parliaments sat by the river and made decrees for half the world, and how the King lived in an ugly palace within sight of the Mother of Parliaments, and how it was the greatest of ports, and how in Westminster Abbey all the noblest of men lay buried. She was not interested and asked:

"Where's the Crystal Palace, where they play the Cup-tie?"

He did not know where in London, or out of it, the Crystal Palace might be, and she was delighted to find a gap in his knowledge. On the whole she took her lessons very seriously, and he found that he could get her to apply herself to almost any subject if he promised that at the end of it she should be allowed to read. . . . Teaching under these circumstances he found more difficult than ever he had imagined it could be. In his Form-room by the glass roof of the gymnasium he had been backed by tradition, the ground had been prepared for him in the lower Forms; there was the whole complicated machinery of the school to give him weight and authority. Further, the subjects of instruction were settled for him by the Oxford and Cambridge Examination Board. Now he was somewhat nettled to find that, though he might draw up and amend curricula, he was more and more forced to take the nature and extent of his teaching from his pupil, who, having no precise object in view, followed only her instinct, and that seemed to bid her not so much to lay up stores of knowledge as to disencumber herself, to throw out ballast, everything that impeded the buoyancy of her nature.

They were very pleasant hours for both of them, and in her company he learned to give as little thought to the future as she. At first, after he recovered, he fidgeted because there were no letters. Day after day passed and brought him no communication from the outside world. Being a member of many committees and boards, he was used to a voluminous if uninteresting post. However, he got used to their absence, and what with work in the theater and teaching Matilda he had little time for regret or anxiety. He had been up from his bed a whole week before he bought a newspaper, that which he had been in the habit of reading in his morning train. It was dull and only one announcement engaged his attention; the advertisement of the school setting forth the fees and the opening date of the next term--September 19. That gave him four weeks in which freely to enjoy his present company. Thereafter surely there would be investigation, inquiry for him, the scandal would reach his relatives and they would--would they not?--cause a search for him. Till then he might be presumed to be holiday-making.

Meanwhile he had grown used to Mr. Copas's manner of living--the dirt, the untidiness, the coarse food, the long listlessness of the day, the excitement and feverishness of the evening. Mrs. Copas's disfigurements were long in healing, and when he was well enough he replaced her at the door and took the money, and sold the grimy-thumbed tickets for the front seats. He sat through every performance and became acquainted with every item in Mr. Copas's repertory. With that remarkable person he composed a version of "Iphigenia," for from his first sketch of the play Mr. Copas had had his eye on Agamemnon as a part worthy of his powers. Mr. Mole insisted that Matilda should play the part of Iphigenia, and Mrs. Copas was given Clytemnestra wherewith to do her worst. . . . The only portion of the piece that was written was Iphigenia's share of her scenes with Agamemnon. These Old Mole wrote out in as good prose as he could muster, and she learned them by heart. Unfortunately they were too long for Mr. Copas, and when it came to performance--there were only two rehearsals--he burst into them with his gigantic voice and hailed tirades at his audience about the bitterness of ingratitude in a fair and favorite daughter, trounced Clytemnestra for the lamentable upbringing she had given their child, and, in the end, deprived Iphigenia of the luxury of slaughter by falling on his sword and crying:

"Thus like a Roman and a most unhappy father I die of thrice and doubly damned, self-inflicted wounds. By my example let all men, especially my daughter, know there is a canon fixed against self-slaughter."

He made nonsense of the whole thing, but it was wonderfully effective. So far as it was at all lucid the play seemed to represent Agamemnon as a wretched man driven to a miserable end by a shrewish wife and daughter.

Much the same fate attended Mr. Mole's other contribution to the repertory, a Napoleonic drama in which Mr. Copas figured--immensely to his own satisfaction--as the Corsican torn between an elderly and stout Marie Louise and a youthful and declamatory Josephine. Through five acts Mr. Copas raged and stormed up and down the Emperor's career, had scenes with Josephine and Marie Louise when he felt like it, confided his troubles and ambitions to Murat when he wanted a rest from his ranting, sacked countries, cities, ports as easily and neatly as you or I might pocket the red at billiards, made ponderous love to the golden-haired lady of the Court, introduced comic scenes with the lugubrious young man, wept over the child, dressed up as L'Aiglon, whom he called "Little Boney," banished Josephine from the Court, and died on the battlefield of Waterloo yielding up his sword to the Duke of Wellington, represented by Mr. Mole, his first appearance upon any stage, with this farewell:

"My last word to England is--be good to Josephine."

It was the Theater Royal's most successful piece. The inhabitants of that little Staffordshire town had heard of the Duke of Wellington and they applauded him to the echo. Every night when they played that stirring drama, after Mr. Copas had taken his fill of the applause, there were calls for the Duke, and Mr. Mole would appear leading Josephine by the hand.

At the top of their success Mr. Copas decided to move on.

"In this business," he said, "you have to know when to go. You have to leave 'em ripe for the next visit, and go away and squeeze another orange. I said to Mrs. Copas, the night you came, that you looked like luck. You've done it. If you'll stay, sir, I'll give you a pound a week. You're a nartist, you are. That Wellington bit of yours without a word to say--d'you know what we call that? We call that 'olding the stage. It takes a nartist to do that."

Mr. Mole took this praise with becoming modesty and said that he would stay, for the present. Then he added:

"And about Matilda?"

"She's my own niece," replied Mr. Copas, "but I don't mind telling you that she's not a bit o' good. She ain't got the voice. She ain't got the fizzikew. When there's a bit o' real acting to be done, she isn't there. She just isn't there. There's a hole where she ought to be. I'm bothered about that girl, I am, bothered. She doesn't earn her keep."

"I thought she was very charming."

"Pretty and all that, but that's not acting. Set her against Mrs. Copas and where is she?"

Mr. Mole's own private opinion was that on the stage Mrs. Copas was repulsive. However, he kept that to himself. Very quietly he said:

"If Matilda goes, I go."

Mr. Copas looked very mysterious and winked at him vigorously. Then he grinned and held out a dirty hand.

"Put it there, my boy, put it there. What's yours?"

Within half an hour he had coaxed another ten pounds out of Mr. Mole's pocket and Matilda's tenure of the part of Josephine was guaranteed.

At their next stopping-place, on the outskirts of the Pottery towns, disaster awaited the company. A wheel of the caravan jammed as they were going down a hill and delayed them for some hours, so that they arrived too late in the evening to give a performance. Mr. Copas insisted that the theater should be erected, and lashed his assistants with bitter and blasphemous words, so that they became excited and flurried and made a sad muddle of their work. When at last it was finished and Mr. Copas went out himself to post up his bills on the walls of the neighborhood, where of all places he regarded his fame as most secure, he had got no farther than the corner of the square when he came on a gleaming white building that looked as though it were made of icing sugar, glittering and dazzling with electric light and plastered all over with lurid pictures of detectives and criminals and passionate men and women in the throes of amorous catastrophes and dilemmas. He stopped outside this place and stared it up and down, gave it his most devastating fore-and-aft look, and uttered one word:

"Blast!"

Then unsteadily he made for the door of the public-house adjoining it and called for the landlord, whom he had known twenty years and more. From the platform of the theater Mrs. Copas saw him go in, and she rushed to find Mr. Mole, and implored him to deliver her husband from the seven devils who would assuredly possess him unless he were speedily rescued and sent a-billposting.

Mr. Mole obeyed, and found the actor storming at the publican, asking him how he dare take the bread from the belly and the air from the nostrils of a nartist with a lot o' dancing dotty pictures. With difficulty Mr. Copas was soothed and placated. He had ordered a glass of beer in order to give himself a status in the house, and the publican would not let him pay for it. Whereupon he spilled it on the sanded floor and stalked out. Mr. Mole followed him and found him brooding over a poster outside the "kinema" which represented a lady in the act of saving her child from a burning hotel. He seized his paste-pot, took out a bill from his satchel, and covered the heads of the lady and her child with the announcement of his own arrival with new plays and a brilliant and distinguished company.

When he was safely round the corner he seized his companion by the arm and said excitedly:

"Ruining the country they are with them things. Last time I pitched opposite one o' them, when they ought to have been working my own company was in there watching the pictures."

"I have always understood," replied Mr. Mole, "that they have a considerable educational value, and certainly it seems to me that through them the people can come by a more accurate knowledge of the countries and customs of the world than by reading or verbal instruction."

Mr. Copas snorted:

"Have you _seen_ 'em?"

"No."

"Then talk when you have. I say it's ruining the country and pampering the public. Who wants to know about the countries and customs of the world? What men and women want to know is the workings of the human heart."

Unexpectedly Mr. Mole found himself reduced to triteness. The only comment that presented itself to his mind was that the human heart was a mystery beyond knowing, but that did not allow him to controvert the actor's dictum that no one wanted to know about the countries and customs of the world, and he wondered whether the kinematograph did, in fact, convey a more accurate impression of the wonders of the world than Hakluyt or Sir John Mandeville, who did, at any rate, present the results of their travels and inventions with that pride in both truth and lying which begets style.